Scott Adams

Better vs Different

In search of better

Every day, in almost every office of almost every organization, people are going to get together to make something better.

Making things better is a natural impulse, especially if you want to grow.

Unfortunately, better is not always the right strategy. Better is not always superior to different.

When you make something that works a little better, you're playing the same game, just keeping up with the status quo. When you make something different, on the other hand, you're trying to change the game.

The next time your engineers or customer service people want to initiate a project to make something better, challenge them to make something different instead.

Every day, in almost every office of almost every organization, people are going to get together to make something better.

Making things better is a natural impulse, especially if you want to grow.

Unfortunately, better is not always the right strategy. Better is not always superior to different.

When you make something that works a little better, you're playing the same game, just keeping up with the status quo. When you make something different, on the other hand, you're trying to change the game.

The next time your engineers or customer service people want to initiate a project to make something better, challenge them to make something different instead.

How is technology like ketchup?

5/22/2006 5:58:47 PM [Casting Out Nines] [Robert Talbert][Comments]

I heard this story on the radio while going to the grocery store this afternoon:

A new banned substance is making its way around Chandler Basha High School — ketchup. Bottles of the condiment have been smuggled into the cafeteria and promptly confiscated when students whipped them out for their burgers and fries.

The ketchup conspiracy began last week when school administrators, fed up with students stomping on ketchup packets and squirting the red goo on sidewalks and hallways, limited ketchup to three packets per burger. If they want more, they have to pay up: 25 cents per extra packet.

Outraged, about 50 students boycotted cafeteria food a week ago to send a message, and they’re still bringing their lunch this week, said Chris Goldsmith, a junior at the school.[…]

A black market even started up. Some students are selling their contraband at five packets for 25 cents.

Goldsmith said he doesn’t know anyone who stomped on the packets, but “as long as it doesn’t get on me, I’m fine. That’s what I think janitors are for.”

There’s a lesson here about high school students: They are not all dumb, and they will figure out creative ways to get around restrictions that you place on the things they want to do, if they want to do them badly enough.

There’s also a pretty obvious parallel here to a string of posts we’ve seen here on banning technology — banning technology because of the irresponsible behavior of a few people is only going to result in students breaking more rules to use technology in legitimate ways that ought not to have been restricted in the first place.

It’s a lot easier just to slap a ban on something because of a few people’s bad behavior, but ultimately it just doesn’t really work for anybody.

New contact information

Instructional Systems Specialist

Little Rock Employee Education Resource Center (138E)

Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System

2200 Ft. Roots Drive, Bldg. 11

North Little Rock, AR 72114-1709

501-257-4204 Phone

501-257-4190 Fax

VA Email [email protected]

Gmail [email protected]

Googling 2.0

How Google Plans to Change the Scope of Googling (And Why Information and Knowledge Workers Should Care)

Want to find out where the weird word “pachyderm” came from? Just google the phrase “pachyderm etymology” and within a second you can learn how the English word traces its roots back to Frenchman Georges Cuvier, the father of modern biology. In 1797 Cuvier began using the French pachyderme to describe animals like elephants and hippopotami. The French term derives from pachydermos, the Greek word for thick-skinned.

Want to find out where your company’s 2005 revenue came from? Good luck to you.

These days, employees feel increasingly confident that they can find anything, just as long as it’s external information. But if it’s right under their noses in their companies’ databases, their confidence will often be much lower. (And they will assume that it will take a lot longer to find it.) One obvious culprit is the massive quantity of internal or proprietary data that companies now stockpile—an amount that continues to grow 40-70 percent a year. As one analyst recently noted, “in the same way that consumers were set adrift in the early days of the Web, enterprises are now drowning in data sets of their own.”

Enter Google, which is now redoubling its efforts to do for internal information what it once did for the Internet. Below we offer excerpts from a few noteworthy articles that outline the company’s strategy to “go corporate”—and thus diversify away from its core search-advertising business, which currently drives 95 percent of its sales.

- In “Google shifts focus to show it means business,” Matthew Glotzbach, Google’s head of enterprise products, explains: "Companies have to deal with [internal content explosion] if they want to compete. Google wants to use its experience in web search to provide a ‘fast front door’ to that information – one that doesn’t require any special training for users."

- Quoted in another article, “Enterprise Search: A Different Animal,” Glotzback describes how Google’s search appliance allows administrators to select documents that will appear at the top of results for specific key words, not unlike the way Google.com returns a few paid listings at the top of natural search results. “It's almost like an internal ad.”

- In an interview with CIO Insight, Dave Girouard, general manager of the enterprise business, describes the fruits of his customer research: “When you put Google inside a company…There's almost a sigh of relief that now they'll be able to find their information. For us, that is always the most important thing—how well does it solve the problem for the end-user.”

- Finally, in “Google dodges knowledge management question,” you’ll see Google product marketing manager Arvind Desikan do just that. However, Desikan does mention a couple of potential case studies worth tracking, "We appear to have served the knowledge management needs of several large companies to date, including BA and Schlumberger."

Digital natives and the news

Link:

The process of experiencing news of those Born Digital – the Digital Natives — is famously different from the generations they succeed. DNs don’t read the New York Times or their local paper cover-to-cover over coffee in the morning, nor return home to hear the news read by Walter Cronkhite or Dan Rather (then discuss it around the dinner table or around the water cooler or at the pub or over bridge or at the Elk’s Lodge).

What is the process of news and information gathering for the DN? Here’s a
hypothesis. It’s a three-step process: Grazing, Deep(er) Dive(s), and the Feedback Loop.

It works, in the paradigmatic sense, like this:

1) Grazing: The citizen gets introduced to new facts through a process of grazing. The source of the facts might be Jon Stewart; it might be an RSS reader with aggregated news sources; it might by a My Yahoo! page or Google news or a PubSub alert; it might be a filtered set of news offerings served up to a Blackberry; it might be passively listening to radio in the car or a news channel at the gym from the seat of a recumbent bike; it might be from peers or blogs (of the Scripting News, Instapundit variety — at once prominent and generous with links) or Drudge; or any number of other introducers of facts, including offline. The net effect is that the citizen has the bare fact, or the headline, and perhaps a bit more (on the order of a paragraph), but no real context. The fact may not be verified and may prove to be false or misleading. In terms of the competition to provide this service, speed and relevance are the sole factors.

2) Deep Dive: The citizen makes her decision that she wants to go beyond the headline, to learn more about a topic beyond the basic fact she’s been exposed to. This is where the citizen goes to dig for context for the fact that’s been introduced. The citizen might choose the “channel” for this information because of celebrity (she likes a certain news anchor’s hair); politics (she likes a certain slant on the news); brand (a given source has a brand that appeals to her); or other reasons. The deep dive helps to make sense of the news, to put it into a frame, to offer an analysis of it, to introduce relevant other voices. This is where trust, branding, credibility come in. This is where news organizations, especially powerful and wealthy institutions — able to afford bureaus and the like — can add the most value. Some blogs fill this role, too — Global Voices might be an example. (Query: is there any reason why you wouldn’t want 1000, or 1,000,000, or n, “channels” at this level, so long as we’re able to discern and choose? See the Daily Me debate and the like for counter-arguments.) The key factor is not speed here, though timeliness is important; the key factors are accuracy, trustworthiness, insight/analysis, and relationship.

3) Feedback Loop: This stage is not for everyone, and is the hardest for traditionalists to grapple with, but an increasing number of citizens want to take another step and to engage more meaningfully with the fact and the context. It might mean blogging something yourself on an obscure blog (like this one!), creating your own podcast or vlog, or commenting on someone else’s blog or a wiki or bulletin board. Or send an e-mail to a listserv or to a network news program. The idea is to talk back — to act as an empowered citizen, able to have an impact on the way the story is told. This feedback loop may be taken seriously, or it may not, by others in the citizen generated media movement, by mainstream media, by decision-makers. It’s in theory good for participatory and semiotic democracy. The role of media in the feedback loop might be to provide an easy means to do it, or to serve as an aggregator by topic of multiple viewpoints from the broader community (loop back to the “deep-dive” step). The feedback loop might also involve taking local news and making it of broader relevance, to a non-local audience. The key factor is the ability to participate with the hopes of being heard, able to affect the outcome of the debate in some fashion, even if only for a few people.

Consider the feedback loop open.

Commentary on DOPA

Outside the Wall (Waters) 1:42

All alone, or in two's,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and artists
Make their stand.

And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.

                           

"Isn't this where...."

Wired News: The Eternal Value of Privacy

The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the concept of liberty.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered.

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Wired News: The Eternal Value of Privacy.

Podcasting Legal Guide

Podcasting Legal Guide

The Podcasting Legal Guide (a collaborative wiki) provides much-needed information and legal guidelines for podcasters in era our of “publish at will.” In the guide’s forward, Larry Lessig notes:

“Copyright law” is essential in a digital age. But it ought to be a copyright law made for a digital age. Ours is not. And this fantastic Guide for those wanting to obey the rules should be evidence enough to convince anyone of that fact.

Via the Creative Commons website.

Overzealous filters hinder research

Study: Overzealous filters hinder researchBy Corey Murray, Associate Editor, eSchool News
October 13, 2005

The internet-content filters most commonly used by schools block needed, legitimate content more often than not, according to a study by a university librarian. Her report was presented at the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) conference in Pittsburgh last week.

Better communication between technology staff and classroom teachers is the key to ensuring that school and library internet filters, installed as part of a federal effort to protect children from inappropriate online content, do not preclude students from accessing legitimate educational materials, the new study found.

Presented Oct. 8, the study chronicles the difficulties confronted by two educationally diverse groups of English students assigned to conduct term-paper research with filtered internet access in a high school media center.

Using the experiences of this school as a typical example, the study's author, Lynn Sutton, director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, finds that internet filters are apt to block legitimate educational content. Tech-savvy students, meanwhile, argue that administrators should have more faith in their judgment and ability to deal with inappropriate content, and they blame the school--not their teachers--for prohibiting them from conducting sound, unbiased research, the report said.

The U.S. Department of Education estimates that 90 percent of K-12 schools today employ some sort of web filtering technology in adherence with guidelines set forth as part of the Children's Internet Protection Act, the five-year-old law that requires libraries to install filters or surrender federal funding, including eRate discounts on telecommunications services and internet access.

But, based on her findings, filters overstep their bounds in many cases, Sutton says. And, whether teachers simply are too busy to follow up with technology staff to request access to legitimate sites, or--worse--technology staff aren't responsive enough to the needs of classroom teachers, too often educationally useful sites aren't removed from these filters' block lists, despite the ability of administrators to remove them at the local level.

eSchool News online.

Linguist Nunberg discusses problems of Internet filters: 1/03

Linguist Nunberg discusses problems of Internet filters

Of all the "rotten information" floating around the Internet ­ graphic violence, racism, pirated software, term papers for sale, incorrect facts, bomb-making instructions ­ pornography has spawned the most hysteria, according to Geoffrey Nunberg, a senior researcher at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information. But Internet filters regularly snag protected speech as well as smut, Nunberg said.

At Thursday's Symbolic Systems Forum, the linguist discussed the social, legal and technological issues raised during a recent court challenge to the federal Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). His presentation was titled "Faulty Filters: What to Do About 'Rotten Information' in the Digital Age?"

Nunberg served as an expert witness for the American Library Association and other plaintiffs, including the public libraries of Multnomah County in Oregon, the American Civil Liberties Union and a variety of websites and library patrons, that argue CIPA is unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.

In March, the case was heard by a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Government lawyers, while conceding problems with Internet filters, maintained that, in accordance with CIPA, the software blocked the majority of obscene web pages. The government also argued that since book stacks in public libraries are generally free of pornography, people should not have access to it via library computers.

The libraries argued that filters inevitably block at least some constitutionally protected speech, which constitutes "prior restraint" -- censorship of speech before it has undergone judicial review. They also argued that the Internet constitutes "an open public forum" and as such cannot be treated as a traditional library.



Filtering technology

A frenzied search for technological solutions to the problem of smut in cyberspace began about five years ago, and companies that make filters haven't been shy about leveraging this anxiety to boost sales, Nunberg said.

Meanwhile, Congress has passed several laws attempting to shield the eyes of young web surfers from X-rated material online. The first was the Communications Decency Act, which was voted into law in 1996 but struck down the following year by the Supreme Court. CIPA, which was signed into law by former President Clinton shortly before he left office, is only the most recent legislative attempt. It requires public schools and libraries to install a "technology protection measure," such as an Internet filter, to guard against depictions that are obscene, contain child pornography or are harmful to minors. Failure to comply means the loss of federal subsidies for Internet use.

There are two types of Internet filters: database filters, which compare the uniform resource locator (URL) or Internet protocol (IP) address to a control list; and dynamic filters, which look at the content of a web page in real time and rely on word lists and algorithms to determine whether a page should be blocked.

Dynamic filters catch more but overblock more; database filters are more precise but miss a lot, and they sometimes block websites at their root URLs. Thus, some filters might block all of www.playboy.com, including interviews and consumer information "and other things that are not only protected speech but conceivably useful," Nunberg said.

It becomes even more problematic when a filter blocks an IP address, which may host a pornographic magazine but also, say, a children's soccer league website, Nunberg said. The URLs may differ, but both sites are clients of the same virtual host.

When Nunberg and others involved in the case examined libraries' Internet logs, they found that 6 to 10 percent of websites listed had been inappropriately blocked by filters. "That's a big number, particularly when you consider how many sites are on the web," he said.

In May, the three-judge panel ruled overwhelmingly in favor of the American Library Association et al. The court argued that the technology would violate the First Amendment rights of library patrons by blocking too much acceptable material. The government has appealed the decision, and the case is scheduled to go before the Supreme Court on March 5.

The Symbolic Systems Forum, a weekly series, is held at 4:15 p.m. Thursdays in Room 380C of Building 380 (Math Corner). On Thursday, Jan. 16, the speaker will Nils Nilsson, the Kumagai Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus, who will present a talk titled "Considerations Regarding Human-Level Artificial Intelligence."

Linguist Nunberg discusses problems of Internet filters: 1/03.